3The narrator seems to revel in the boundless variety of languages, idioms and dialects available to him, as well as in the innumerable expressive possibilities contained within each language, and to give free rein to his unbridled linguistic facetiousness. The sheer extravagance of this linguistic crosscut section, the abounding wealth of words, sounds and meanings, compose a rich and intricate mosaic of languages, jargons and idioms. Through this linguistic extravaganza, Ghosh outlines a program – which works at the level both of poetics and of ethics – for the deterritorialization of English, a process linked to the crucial questions raised by globalization, and in particular to contemporary language issues, which tend to equate the phenomenon of the worldwide spread of English with Globish, the utilitarian, matter-of-fact and uninspired language of international communication. But Ghosh’s novel shows that the process of deterritorialization of English goes beyond this trend. The diasporic point of view in the novel dramatizes the questions raised by the use of English as a language displaced by the multiplication of situations of enunciation in a “global” world, and shows that the process of deterritorialization must be understood first as an adventure in language, in which categories of meaning are constantly being broken down, shifted, and relocated.

4But the narrative goes beyond this literary project of deterritorialization, which is shared by many Indian English writers today, in that it also attempts to resurrect idioms that have now become extinct: for instance, the Anglo-Indian idiom spoken by the British in India, as illustrated in the novels of Kipling or Flora Annie Steel, and Laskari, the pidgin and the specialized nautical jargon of the lascars – the Asian sailors who worked on the European schooners sailing the Indian and the Pacific Oceans for purposes of trade during the age of sail. What Ghosh is attempting to do in this novel, then, is to trace the story of early “global” languages which can perhaps be seen as forerunners of the deterritorialized englishes of today. In his 1992 novel, In an Antique Land, Ghosh pondered over the same issue and speculated that medieval traders across the Indian Ocean communicated by “using a trading argot, or an elaborated pidgin language” (281), since “common sense suggests that in an area as large and as diverse as the Indian Ocean, business could not possibly have been conducted in Tulu, Arabic, Gujarati, or indeed any tongue that was native to a single group of traders; to function at all the language of everyday business would have had to be both simpler and much more widely dispersed than any ordinary language” (280).

5In Sea of Poppies, Ghosh goes one step further and attempts to actually revive idioms of this kind that have fallen into disuse, and been long forgotten. In this sense he is departing from the typically Rushdian brand of Masala English: his “Indianized English” is not only the result of a creative distortion of English or of the poetic interference of English and Hindi or Urdu; it is also an attempt to recover and resurrect idioms that have gone extinct, through a careful archaeological exhumation of different layers of language, so to speak, combined with poetic means and literary devices. Through this strategy, the narrative revives two long-forgotten idioms, Anglo-Indian and Laskari, and explores the sedimentation of language, the layers of history which a tongue is built on, thus illustrating Daniel Heller-Roazen’s contention that:

Language has no being beyond its drifting parts, and its sole consistency may lie in the layers of forgetting and remembrance that tie and untie it, in ever-changing ways, to those before it [...]. One might consider “a” language in this sense to be a measureless mass, bearing, in each of its slates, the perceptible and the imperceptible absence of those worn away from it: the shifting sum, so to speak, of those continually subtracted from it in time. (97)

6Ghosh thus attempts to map the diversity of languages that were actually spoken in South Asia in the 1830s, and to render them as faithfully as possible in the narrative. In this sense, he is being true to his own training as a historian and an anthropologist, and to the specific brand of fiction-writing which he has developed over the years, and which always mixes historical fact and fiction, breaking down the artificial boundaries between history, anthropology, geography and fiction, in an endeavor to uncover the intricate patterns and networks which constitute what Meenakshi Mukherjee calls the “co-ordinates of meaning” in Ghosh’s fiction (134), the shadow lines crisscrossing through historical and geographical narratives.

7This article will attempt to investigate this oscillation between fact and fiction, by comparing the novel with the paratextual apparatus which is provided or suggested by the book: I will endeavor to show how this apparatus can actually be seen as forming an inherent part of the work, and how painstaking historical research and poetic means are combined in order to give a new lease of life to long-forgotten idioms.

Lexicons and glossaries

8In Seuils the literary theorist Gérard Genette defines the paratext as a threshold: it is a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction. In other terms the paratext not only informs the reading of the text, but can also play a central role in shaping the narrative and its language. I contend that the paratext must be read as an inherent part of the creative process itself in the case of Sea of Poppies.

9The most obvious paratext is directly appended to the book. The novel ends with a few pages of acknowledgments that pay tribute to the lexicographers and linguists of the past, such as Lt. Thomas Roebuck, who wrote A Laskari Dictionary or Anglo-Indian Vocabulary of Nautical Terms and Phrases, in English and Hindusthani, first published in Calcutta in 1811, revised and reissued in 1813 and 1882. Ghosh also mentions the famous Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, written by Colonel Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell and first published in 1886. These bibliographical references highlight the importance of lexical investigation for the novel.

10Unlike many earlier Indian English novels, Sea of Poppies is not fitted with a glossary, nor are most of the more unfamiliar words necessarily followed by a translation or an explanation. At times, the lay reader cannot but be somewhat puzzled by the idioms reproduced in the text and this perplexity is often echoed by the characters themselves, when they do not share the same lingo as the person they are speaking to: “From what I hear the Rascal’s going to be in for a samjaoing soon enough. The kubber is that his cuzzanah is running out,” says the Anglo-Indian river pilot Mr. Doughty to the American Zachary. “Cu – cuzzanah? Now there you go again Mr Doughty: that’s another word I don’t know the meaning of” (SP 45), complains a baffled Zachary, only to be told that it was about time he stopped behaving like a “gudda” – “that’s a donkey in case you were wondering” – and learnt the “zubben – the flash lingo of the east” (SP 45).

Later, within the dynasty that claimed its descent from him, many stories would be invented about the surname of the founding ancestors and the reasons why “Maddow” occurred so frequently among his descendents. While many would choose to recast their origins inventing grand and fanciful lineages for themselves, there would always remain a few who clung steadfastly to the truth: which was that those hallowed names were the result of the stumbling tongue of a harried gomusta, and the faulty hearing of an English pilot who was a little more than half-seas over. (SP 262)

13This opportunity of reinventing oneself is one of the defining characteristics of the ideal diasporic subject. Similarly, the Chrestomathy implies, languages that are caught up in the colonial and diasporic processes also recast themselves through their displacement. This is why postcolonial and diasporic literatures constantly dramatize the activities of linguistic displacement – translation, transformation, creolization – through word play, meaning shifts, exaggeration, or other poetic devices. Thus the Anglo-Indian idiom revived in Sea of Poppies is not merely the precise reflection of a historical linguistic context, but also a literary idiom crafted for poetic purposes.

Anglo-Indian speech in the novel

14Several British characters in the novel belong to the Anglo-Indian tradition, and speak in the Anglo-Indian idiom, the variety of English which was used by the British in India at the time of the Raj and was heavily laced with Indian words whose inclusion into this idiom often resulted from the social, political and economic factors of the colonial situation, as Ivor Lewis underlines in the preface to his glossary of Anglo-Indian terms, Sahibs, Nabobs and Boxwallahs:

It has been possible from the beginning of the seventeenth to the middle of the twentieth century to associate, with varying degrees of certainty, the dates of acquiring Indian expressions broadly with the prevailing social, official, political, commercial and personal relationships existing between the Indians and the British. This is social history documented by dated lexical items appropriate to the various linguistic registers and contexts of Anglo-Indian usage. (8)

15Mr. Doughty, the cantankerous river pilot who steers the Ibis into the tricky Hooghly estuary, is one such Anglo-Indian character: “Where’s the mate? Has he been given the kubber that my bunder-boat has lagowed? Don’t just stand there: jaw! Hop to it, before I give your ganders a taste of my lattee. Have you saying your bysmellas before you know it” (SP 23). One noteworthy characteristic of this idiom is that it absorbed a number of “Hindustani” words, but the various spellings of these words in the text are not a transcription of the Indian pronunciation. These words are spelt in Sea of Poppies the way Anglo-Indians used to (mis)pronounce and (mis)spell them, as recorded in Kipling’s novels, for instance, and in a number of Anglo-Indian glossaries: in addition to Ivor Lewis’s book, and to the Hobson-Jobson, readers can refer to Nigel Hankin’s Hanklyn-Janklyn. A Stranger’s Rumble-Tumble Guide to Some Words, Customs and Quiddities Indian and Indo-British, or George Whitworth’s An Anglo-Indian Dictionary for instance. The vocabulary and morpho-syntactic forms of the words used in the short excerpt given above reveal the tight link between power and language which lies at the heart of the colonial encounter: Mr. Doughty adds tense and person inflections to the second person imperative form as if it were the root form of these verbs. For example, “my boat has lagowed” is to be understood as “my boat has been moored,” from the Hindi “lagâo” (the imperative form of “lagânâ,” meaning “attach, apply, join, fix”). The warping of Indian words, whether through corrupting pronunciation, or through grammatical distortion, is evidently a form of symbolic violence imposed upon the colonized tongue. This linguistic violence can also be revealed in certain cases where a double meaning appears, for instance in the use of the spelling “jaw” for the order “jao”: “go.” The word “jaw,” evocative of feral violence in English, also implicitly reveals the relation of dominance that is inscribed into the use of language by the British characters. Poetics here take over from strict historical accuracy.

16Sea of Poppies also features comprehensive lists of professions and everyday objects which are integrated within the narrative, and accompanied with a few brief words of explanation. For instance, the narrator draws up an inventory of the domestic servants of an Anglo-Indian household:

curiosity about the newly arrived missy-mem had spread to the bobachee-connah and many of the kitchen staff were lurking in the anterior vestibule, where the punkah-wallahs sat, pulling their overhead fans by means of ropes attached to their toes: among them were the curry consumah, the caleefa who roasted the kabobs and the bobachees who were responsible for the stews and the joints of beef. The indoors servants had even contrived to smuggle in a few whose place was strictly out-of-doors – malis from the garden, syces and julibdars from the stables, durwauns from the gatehouse, and even some beasties from the gang that kept the house supplied with water. (SP 117)

17Other lists draw together technical terms designating the ranks of native administrative professions in Anglo-India, such as “cranny, serishta, carcoon, munshi, mootsuddy and gomusta” (SP 150). Passages like these are rife in Sea of Poppies which consistently exploits the poetic possibilities of lexical inventories, and contribute to the general effect of linguistic defamiliarization.

18A similar strategy of glossing and identification is at work when unfamiliar words are inserted within the morpho-syntactic structure of very common collocations: the reader is easily able to replace the unfamiliar word with the more common one and thus make sense of the sentence. For example, when Mrs. Burnham summons Paulette to tell her that the middle-aged and censorious Mr. Kendalbushe is desirous of securing her for his bride, she uses Anglo-Indian equivalents of common British expressions:

Can you imagine, dear, what a prodigious stroke of kismet it will be for you to bag Mr. Kendalbushe? […] Ever since he’s lost his wife, every larkin in town’s been trying to bundo him. I can tell you, dear, there’s a paltan of mems who’d give their last anna to be in your jooties. (SP 251)

In other terms, every girl in town has been trying to snap up Mr. Kendalbushe and scores of memsahibs would give their last farthing to be in Paulette’s shoes. This little lecture is easy enough to decipher even if the reader has no previous grounding in basic Anglo-Indian, and it is easy to perceive that the exaggerated linguistic construction here is playful rather than strictly realistic.

19The poetic means mobilized by the author are thus combined with the lexical and philological excavation, made evident in the acknowledgments and the Chrestomathy, in order to revive the Anglo-Indian idiom of colonial days.

The language of the lascars

20The other major paratext provided for this novel focuses on the other lost language of Sea of Poppies and is an article written by Amitav Ghosh, entitled “Of Fanás and Forecastles: the Indian Ocean and Some Lost Languages of the Age of Sail,” which the author published in June 2008 in the Economic and Political Weekly (or EPW, an important Indian left-leaning magazine published in Mumbai). In this quasi-scholarly piece based on primary and secondary sources, Ghosh retraces the story of Indian Ocean navigators and their idioms. The term “lascar” referred indifferently to the Arabs, south Asians, Malays, east Africans, Filipinos and Chinese who worked in the crews of merchant ships of the Indian Ocean region in the age of sail. As such, the term belongs both to the nautical and the colonial contexts.

21Ghosh’s EPW article can be seen as a sort of gloss on the use of Laskari in the novel, which is why, again, I consider it as a paratext. The article is derived from a keynote lecture which Ghosh delivered in August 2007 at a Johannesburg conference, and the research that went into the lecture clearly formed the basis of Ghosh’s preparatory work for Sea of Poppies. Characteristically, Ghosh sets out to show that present-day globalization has its roots in the past: “It is common nowadays to hear ‘diversity’ being spoken of as though it were some thrilling new invention. But it is unlikely that there were ever any more diverse collections of people [...] than the crews of merchant ships in the age of sail” (57). Ghosh can only surmise what idioms these motley crews could use in order to communicate:

• 7 This Cantonese pidgin, spoken by Ah-Fatt, the Chinese convict who is one of the secondary character (...)

what is more likely is that Roebuck’s Laskari was used only in relation to matters pertaining to the running of the vessel. For the rest the lascars probably used, among themselves, a series of contact languages and pidgins, made up of elements of Swahili, Malay and Hindustani. To communicate with officers and white passengers – and possibly often amongst themselves as well – they probably used variants of the Sino-Portuguese-English pidgin that came to be associated with the South China Coast.7 This marvellously expressive dialect once flourished in many corners of the Indian Ocean, but like Laskari it did not outlast the age of sail. (60)

22In Sea of Poppies, the narrator uses a nautical metaphor to define the Laskari tongue spoken by the crew amongst themselves as:

that motley tongue, spoken nowhere but on the water, whose words were as varied as the port’s traffic, an anarchic medley of Portuguese calaluzes and Kerala pattimars, Arab booms and Bengal paunchways, Malay proas and Tamil catamarans, Hindusthani pulwars and English snows – yet beneath the surface of this farrago of sound, meaning flowed as freely as the currents beneath the crowded press of boats. (96)

23The idiom used by the lascars thus becomes the epitome of a diasporic tongue, a mix of various languages displaced by the multiplication of situations of enunciation in a proto-globalized world, a motley idiom that was forged in diversity and transformation, and, like the ships it was spoken on, travelled the seven seas and spread across the globe. As such, it can be seen as the forerunner of the deterritorialized englishes of today, just as the lascars were, according to Ghosh, “possibly the first Asians and Africans to participate freely, and in substantial numbers, in a globalised workspace” (EPW 58).

24Ghosh’s fascination with the nautical jargon of Laskari and the strange and wonderful coincidences wrought by its etymologies is evidenced in the echoes between the novel and the EPW article: “in this process of naming, languages often met and married with picturesque results: […] the words for the complex set of lateral masts that project forward from a ship’s bows – the jib, jib-boom, etc.” (59) were transformed into jīb, which means “tongue” in some Indian languages. The outermost part of the jib-boom thus became the Shaitan Jīb, the Devil’s tongue. This part of the boat becomes the stage of a dramatic episode in the novel when Jodu, a newly-minted lascar, is bullied by the first mate into clambering along the jīb to arrange a rope, and almost loses his life in the process (SP 392). The power of evocation of the name is thus put to poetic use in the text.

25Likewise, the evocative name given to forecastle in Laskari, the fana, suggests the “hood, as in the flared head of the cobra – and of course, if a ship were to be thought of as a creature of the sea, then this would be exactly the part of its anatomy to which the location of the fana would correspond” (EPW 60). This image is exploited metaphorically in the novel, as Jodu marvels at the magical and epic associations of the word: “Jodu was familiar with the word fana, and had often wondered what it would be like to live and sleep inside the skull of the great living creature that was the ship” (SP 171). Moreover, when languages intersect they can also produce new words or unexpected meanings, which carry poetic undertones rather than merely etymological signification: thus Zachary is renamed “Malum Zikri” by the lascar crew, which delights Paulette who explains “It means the ‘one who remembers’” (SP 238).

28The exuberant evocation of the boundless diversity of languages (both local and global) in Sea of Poppies is forged in the work of literature but also relies on factual research. The fruitful transaction between two types of writing, scholarly and literary, which crumbles the boundaries between anthropological, historical and fictional narratives, emphasizes the inherent heterogeneity of Ghosh’s writing which, in this sense, can be described as quintessentially postcolonial: the narrator is always speaking from multiple sites of enunciation, as anthropologist, historian and fiction-writer, foregrounding his own position and confronting different frames of reference, which overlap but never entirely coincide, which are different yet never radically incommensurable. Ghosh’s painstaking exploration of the history of emerging global languages in the Age of Sail must be understood allegorically as a comment on the spread of English as an international language today. The rich and diverse possibilities offered by the history of the English language and by the various transformations it underwent in former colonies of the British Empire are exploited poetically in Ghosh’s novel in order to challenge a hegemonic and purely anglocentric vision of “Globish” which ignores the complexity of shifting linguistic power-structures today.